A Legwork Mechanism to Assist a Suggesting Module in Finding Worthy Webpages in Search Results

A legwork mechanism for improving the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine is proposed. The feedback of relevant/non-relevant information has been shown to be useful to effectively find most of the relevant web pages in the ranked search results. A suggesting module, a type of relevance feedback engine, can do this job fairly well, but does not perform as well when the feedback information is only about non-relevant webpages. In such an unfavorable circumstance the legwork mechanism assists the suggesting module by handing over the relevant information after finding one or more webpages, containing at least one clue keyword. With a slight increase in time required to select the clue(s) in a presented candidate list, a user is able to find relevant webpages more effectively. The effect of the legwork mechanism was evaluated using various search results on the Japanese search engine goo.